Volume 7: Foreword

Volume 7: Foreword

DEAR READERS,

I am very pleased to announce the publication of the Special Topic “Cosmopolitical and Transnational Interventions in German Studies,” the first installment of our 2011 issue. This Special Topic is the product of a close collaboration with Guest Editors B. Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Elke Segelcke (Illinois State University). The papers included in this Special Topic represent a selection of those presented in the panel series “Cosmopolitical and Transnational Interventions,” which Mani and Segelcke organized for the 2010 Conference of the German Studies Association. These papers have been revised, expanded and peer-reviewed for this publication.

The Guest Editors have worked very closely with the in-house editors of TRANSIT throughout the editorial process, and I am grateful for all of their effort and dedication. I would also like to thank our in-house editors for their hard work in proofreading and copyediting all of the articles. And of course I would like to thank our authors for their contributions, and for their cooperation throughout the editorial process.

The papers included in this Special Topic offer a wide range of perspectives on issues of language, culture, and representation, as well as on the narrative and critical strategies used to address these issues. Please see the table of contents (at right) for a complete list of articles, and see Mani and Segelcke’s introduction for a discussion of these articles and of the political and theoretical contexts in which they are situated.

As I write this, one of our Guest Editors is in Portugal; the other is preparing to leave for Germany; I am in Canada, surrounded by translators from around the world; and our contributors are spread over at least two continents. This collaboration itself is thus a reflection of the widening scope of German Studies as a discipline of global reach and significance. The articles included in this Special Topic consider the implications of the increasingly international scope of our discipline.

This is my last issue as Managing Editor of TRANSIT, and I am happy to finish my editorship with such an engaging and thought-provoking group of articles. I would like to welcome Erik Born, who will be taking over as Managing Editor in the fall.

I hope that you enjoy this Special Topic, and I would like to remind you that TRANSIT continues to accept submissions year-round.